Meetings take up an ever-increasing amount of employee’s, and particularly manager’s time. Executives and managers I work with tell me that 40% to 50% of their time is taken up with meetings, that either they call, or they are asked to attend, leaving precious little time to get work done. The result, according to The Center for Work Life Policy, is that the average professional work week has expanded steadily in the past decade, with many professionals logging between 60 and 70 hours a week. Some people even read their email messages in the bathroom.

A variation of Parkinson’s Law applied to meetings goes something like this: “Meeting activities expand to fill the time available.” Ergo, more time, more activities. If you set an hour for the meeting, people will use the hour, regardless of what is on the agenda. As renowned economist John Kenneth Galbraith once said, “meetings are indispensable when you don’t want to do anything.”

Plenty of studies come up with similar results. In a survey reported in Industry Week, 2,000 managers claimed that at least 30% of the time spent in meetings was a waste of time; a 3M Meeting Network survey of executives found that 25% to 50% of the time people spend in meetings is wasted; and a survey by Office Team, a division of Robert Half International, noted that 45% of senior executives surveyed said employees would be more productive if meetings were banned at least one-day a week.

Another study, reported by Lisa Belkin in the New York Times, by Microsoft, America Online and Salary.com concluded the average worker actually worked only three days a week, or about 1.5 hours a day, and the rest of the working time was “wasted,” with unproductive meetings heading the list of time-wasters.

Al Pittampalli, a former Ernst & Young executive and author of Read This Before Our Next Meeting, argues most meetings are mediocre and not necessary, “not about co-ordination but about a bureaucratic excuse-making and the kabuki dance of company politics. We’re now addicted to meetings that insulate us from the work we ought to be doing.” He contends that traditional meetings create an unnecessary culture of compromise and kill our sense of urgency. He outlines three types of meetings: convenience, formality and social in which a false sense of urgency is created.

Pittampalli argues that informal conversations, group work sessions and brainstorming sessions are not meetings, and shouldn’t be treated as such. The book presents seven principles to make necessary meetings, good. The most striking are:

Meet only to support a decision that has already been made; do not use the meetings to make decisions;

Produce a committed action plan;

Never hold a meeting for informational purposes.

If you absolutely must have meetings, here’s some suggestions to help make them more productive:

Always start the meeting on time, regardless of people who are late;

Do not review the contents of the meeting with the people who are late;

-Reduce the length of meetings to one hour maximum, and preferably less — try 30 minutes, even 15 or 10 minutes;

-End the meeting on the agreed-upon time, even if the agenda is not finished;

-Allow the right for employees to decline their attendance, without having to justify themselves and without penalties;

-Reward employees who show up on time and even early with some kind of small gift;

-Don’t let people who are late to the meeting by more than 15 minutes join the meeting;

-Don’t allow individuals to hijack or dominate meetings by frequent and endless conversation. It’s the responsibility of the meeting leader to control this;

-End meetings early. People will be more positive about participating as a result;

-Do not allow laptops or cellphones to be on or open during meetings. Allowing people to be interrupted or diverting their attention lowers the value of the meeting;

-Don’t tolerate meeting participants working on other things during the meeting. Ask them to leave;

-The meeting leader should enforce only one person speaking at a time, and to the point;

-Ask each participant to prepare for the meeting;

-At the beginning of the meeting, ensure the desired outcome(s) are stated clearly;

-Limit the action items of your meeting to no more than three;

-Interrupt people who either repeat what they have said, or repeat what someone else has covered. These are time wasters.

-Whoever calls the meeting should “own” the meeting; don’t allow someone in the group to try to take it over;

-Table any discussion that is not relevant to the agenda

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